Currently, the standard method used for the diagnosis of bacterial infections is the culture of clinical samples obtained from patients. Culture techniques have been used for many years for clinical diagnosis. Apart from being slow, time-consuming and labour intensive, the reliability of results obtained by culture techniques is very low. Consequently, this has hindered the prescription of effective drugs for treating bacterial infections, resulting in more patient suffering and/or death.
Other shortcomings of present methods of microbial identification include the need for special growth media, the inability to distinguish between closely related species and strains, and the need for large amounts of sample. Importantly, previous methods of microbial detection have found it difficult to simultaneously detect more than one micro-organism in a sample. Consequently, there is a need to develop methods of identifying micro-organisms in samples which are rapid, sensitive and accurate.